Have you ever led or been in a team meeting that went off track? Or does it stretches too long and boring that you slowly lost interest? Of course, we know that feeling!
Team meetings are a great way to engage colleagues, share ideas, and encourage creativity but this won’t happen if your meetings are badly structured or colleagues perceive them to be unnecessary and ineffective.
We’ve got the following tips to guide you and make your meetings rewarding:
1. Plan Ahead – Keep your meeting on track
To avoid one-sided communication, you should share a brief or meeting agenda in advance with your team. Also, take note of important talk points, expected outcomes, and participants to attend, and choose the right time that suits every team member. This will help you evaluate the success of the meeting at the end.
2. Adopt relevant technology
Technology is ever-evolving. You can now enjoy great collaboration tools that will help increase the efficiency of your meetings – send messages, share files, set up online calls and more. Here at SystemSpecs, we use collaboration tools like Zoom, Microsoft Teams, Google suites, GitHub, and more. You should try it out too.
3. Be Time-conscious
When team members are late to meetings, it could result in unnecessary delays. There would be a need to recap and extend meetings to cover the agenda which will interfere with the meeting structure and possibly cause a ruckus. To avoid this, you need to set early attendance rules with reminders ahead of time to keep each member in check. Also, allocate time frames to the agenda outline for better time management.
4. Ask Questions
Be intentional about your team’s participation. The meeting has to be valuable to everyone, so questions should be asked to encourage discussions and input. This way you’ll keep your team members actively interested and involved in the meeting and also confirm they understand the purpose and outcome of the meeting.
5. Set Ground Rules
This might seem too serious but it’s incredibly important to set ground rules that would keep your team members in check to avoid interference that could cause delay or generally any problems. Rules like: camera switched off if it isn’t a video call, mic muted when not speaking, phones silenced, meeting expectations, no interruptions, and others as they apply.
6. Identify Meeting Patterns and Behaviours
If you’re going to change your old meeting patterns, you’ll need to observe your meeting patterns to observe what you think is wrong and also ask your team questions on what should be better improved to make the next meetings more effective. This will give you a better perspective on how the team feels and why they feel that way about your meetings.
7. Improve Each Week and Do a Follow-up
This is a brief check-up that will boost your meetings every time. Less than being told what to do, people love to feel valued and that you care about their wellbeing. It’s not just about checking task completion but also building relationships with your team and checking in on how they are faring, and also how they are coping with their assigned task.
You can ask questions like: What worked and what didn’t? Was the last agenda accurate and helpful? Was there any information we could have shared in another way?
NOTE: Always test whether you need a meeting before setting up one. Once you have established that, you can decide how to use these tips to hold your best meetings ever.
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